The present invention generally relates to a computer-implemented program for a financial planning and advice system, and more particularly, to a computer-implemented program to assist financial advisors in performing financial simulations and other tasks for clients and prospective clients.
To achieve their personal and financial objectives in a prudent and thoughtful manner, investors typically seek a long-term relationship with a trusted and knowledgeable financial advisor. An advisor typically establishes strong one-on-one relationships with clients by consulting with clients regarding their goals and objectives, preparing a financial plan, and eventually conducting financial transactions for the clients. Thus, investors put a large amount of trust in their advisor.
Because a large segment of the financial planning and advising industry is transaction based, a successful advisor, typically should initiate, build, and maintain a long-term advisory relationship with each client. Therefore, in order to remain competitive, all barriers to acquiring a client and maintaining a relationship (i.e., service delays and errors, lack of information, poor product performance, and the like) should be identified and substantially reduced. Hence, advisors are continually searching for the best method to foster and maintain relationships with clients.
As the market demand for financial consulting continues to expand, more companies are hiring advisors to acquire and service clients. In order to assist new and existing advisors in finding, creating a rapport, gaining the trust, and ultimately obtaining the business of prospective clients, many companies have found that increased contact between the home office and the advisor is highly desirable. To maintain this close contact, the advisor should know most of the financial products which are provided by his or her company in order to address the client""s questions and concerns.
However, in practice, an advisor typically does not maintain sufficient contact with his or her home office. The lack of communication between the field and the home office often results in reinventing effective methods and systems in different locations. In fact, in many financial planning and advice systems, advisors keep their personal client information locally on a closed system apart from the facilities of the home office. Thus, advisors using an exclusively local database are often required to re-enter corporate data multiple times as they work through the planning process with clients. Failure to properly enter and receive the desired information often creates delays and errors which may lead to a loss of clients. Therefore, a system is needed which allows an advisor to directly communicate with a continuously updated host database (located at a home office), and provide clients with real time and current information.
To provide these services, advisors typically need an effective financial planning and advisory system which has the capability of analyzing future financial options. For many years, the financial planning industry has attempted to create an optimal system to service its clients. Because companies are often concerned that their advisors spend too much time performing administrative or clerical tasks not related to client development, a financial planning and advising system needs to allow the advisor to concentrate on customer service.
Goal tracking is an aspect of customer service which corporations often inefficiently organize. At any time, clients usually want to know how their financial portfolio is performing in relation to their goals. In other words, clients want to know xe2x80x9cHow am I doing?xe2x80x9d and xe2x80x9cHow close am I to my goal?xe2x80x9d Advisors should have xe2x80x9creal timexe2x80x9d access to client data, transaction records, and client history in order to solve problems, answer client questions, provide information for scheduled client reviews, and track clients"" goals. The ability to provide immediate answers to a client helps support the relationship sought between the advisor and the client. Currently available systems, presentation tools, and data integration methods are often cumbersome, slow, antiquated, and manually intensive such that they do not meet the growing needs of field advisors. A user friendly financial planning and advising system is needed to assist advisors in using information to create marketing plans, provide base information, and facilitate the transfer of information from advisors to marketing specialists in the home office.
Furthermore, a client typically expects an appropriate amount of information in clear and easy-to-understand statements from the advisor. A need exists for an improved financial planning and advising system within which an advisor may personalize a plan""s contents to each client""s unique situation and preferences.
Currently available financial planning and advising systems often suffer from the principal disadvantages of not being tailored to financial planners and not being able to perform creative financial planning with funds distribution analysis. Thus, the limited data found in existing systems typically does not provide enough information for the advisor to effectively service clients. Current systems also do not often have the ability to perform hypothetical xe2x80x9cwhat ifxe2x80x9d financial scenarios, conduct creative searches, and perform key activities from these search results. As a result, client relations may suffer due to the lack of an efficient system for providing information to the clients; thereby resulting in clients receiving unsound advice.
The foregoing explanation indicates that while conventional computer-implemented financial planning and advising systems exist, they each suffer from the principal disadvantages of not being able to provide sufficient information, manage groups of clients, conduct creative simulations, and perform key financial planning activities from these results. A system and method is needed for providing financial planning and advising which overcomes the shortcomings of the prior art.
The financial planning and advising system of the present invention includes numerous innovative and coordinated features including, inter alia: a user friendly interface; unique grouping capabilities; a Virtual Executor; a financial Simulator; an Earmarker; a Strategizer; a Data Wrapper representative of real world grouping of assets, liabilities, income, and expenses; and a Proposal Constructor. As an example of the innovative features of the present invention, the Virtual Executor simulates the steps required to settle a person""s estate, including all steps from the moment of death until all property, net of costs and taxes, is suitably distributed to survivors (i.e., surviving family members, etc.). The Virtual Executor also suitably determines the legal survivors of the decedent, and transfers the net amounts passing to the survivors to the financial Simulator. As another example, the financial Simulator simulates the results of Virtual Executor disbursement and combines the disbursements with the resources already belonging to the survivors before the death of the family member. These and other objects, features and advantages of the present invention will become more apparent to those skilled in the art from the following more detailed description of the non-limiting preferred embodiments of the invention taken with reference to the accompanying Figures.